A texture is generally represented as a one-, two- or multi-dimensional array of data items used in the calculation of the color or appearance of fragments produced by rasterization of a computer graphics image. A texture may be used to represent image data (either photographic or computer generated), color or transparency data, roughness/smoothness data, and/or reflectivity data. Textures are used to store various parameters such as transparency, reflectivity, and/or bumpiness for a rendering pipeline.
Texture mapping is utilized in the field of 3D computer graphics. For texture mapping, a texture is stored and mapped on to one or more surfaces of a three-dimensional computer model during rendering to represent surface detail in the final image of the model. Texture mapping is employed to increase the visual complexity of a scene without increasing its geometric complexity. Texture mapping allows a rendering system to map an image onto simple scene geometry to make objects look much more complex or realistic than the underlying geometry. Providing realistic computer graphics typically requires many high quality and detailed textures, which may require a large amount of memory. For a particular scene, the memory required by the textures is dependent on the number of textures and the size of each texture.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional and traditional approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such systems with some aspects of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.